Travelling exhibition of Hungarian forced labourers in Soviet Union opens

Budapest, February 24 (MTI) – A travelling exhibition installed in a train wagon was opened at Budapest’s Nyugati railway station on Wednesday.

It pays tribute to Hungarians deported to Soviet forced labour camps in late 1944 and during the first half of 1945. The exhibition forms part of an anniversary programme series running until early 2017.

The exhibition presents the historical background of the era on posters with pictures and shows films including documentaries on the Gulag prisons, Csaba Pécsi, the designer, said at the event.

It will travel after March 15 to railway stations in Cegléd, Kál-Kápolna, Miskolc, Szerencs, Debrecen, Gyula, Kiskunhalas, Baja, Szekszárd, Pécs, Budaörs and Szekesfehérvár, locations where the deportations began, said Elonóra Matkovits-Kretz, the head of the Pécs-Baranya chapter of the National Circle of Germans in Hungary.

An estimated 200,000-230,000 civilians were taken into forced labour camps for malenkiy robot — “a little work” — from the territory of what is today’s Hungary. They included 150,000-170,000 male war prisoners, and 50,000 men and women internees with an ethnic German background. Up to 40 percent of the prisoners died in the camps and many of them are buried in unmarked graves.

Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters